Until now, humanitarian aid organizations, disaster relief agencies, and most governments were missing a critical tool for emergency recover efforts-readily deployable housing for displaced individuals and families. After most natural and man-made disasters, housing needs can be broken into three main periods: short-term housing, medium-term housing, and long-term housing. A few types of specific disasters can be forecast, such as hurricanes, which create a different housing need and a fourth period: pre-event sheltering. The general housing needs during and between those periods are drastically different. Currently, there are no emergency housing systems that can address all four periods and yet be flexible enough to transition from one housing period to the next as needs change, creating a housing gap that exacerbates recovery efforts and increases victims' misery.
For example, when Hurricane Katrina struck Louisiana and Mississippi coastal regions of the United States in August 2005, many residents of those states were left with houses submerged under water or without homes or shelter of any type. After residents in more northern parts of Mississippi were having power returned to their homes, many on the Mississippi Gulf Coast were still living in tents in the parking lots of destroyed retail stores. In Louisiana, many houses also were destroyed in the southeastern parishes, and many New Orleans residents, who were unable to evacuate before the storm, were stranded at the Louisiana Superdome or New Orleans Convention Center in detestable conditions.
After Hurricane Katrina, one government agency attempted to provide housing assistance in the form of trailers, housing vouchers, leased cruise ship cabins, etc. to those most affected by the storm. However, each of these systems has major drawbacks.
Specifically, regarding the housing vouchers, they proved to be inadequate at sheltering large populations for several obvious reasons. First, a housing voucher requires an individual or a family to be relocated to other areas of the affected region in order to shelter them in existing housing units. During a large displacement of the population due to a disaster such as Hurricane Katrina, regional housing quickly reaches capacity, so the remainder of the displaced population is moved out of the region. In the case of Katrina, families from New Orleans were relocated as far away as Boston and Phoenix. By redistributing a large number of people in such an abrupt and rapid manner, regional infrastructure is overwhelmed and cannot maintain day-to-day operations. Housing vouchers present numerous problems with fraud, abuse, and the cost of living in the varying locations to which families are displaced.
Cruise ships were leased after Katrina for a relatively high nightly cost on a per person basis and for a maximum stay of six months. While these ships do allow a number of people to stay in a compact, self-sufficient area for an extended time period, the cruise ships are limited to deep-water ports for deployment, can only handle a small amount of the population from a major disaster, and must be leased or rented from private or foreign fleets.
One governmental agency was widely criticized for the slow and inadequate response in providing temporary housing to residents in need in Mississippi and Louisiana and for the high cost of the travel-type trailers provided to residents. The subject trailers cost approximately $65,000.00 each for purchase and setup on site. This price did not include transportation costs of each trailer to the deployment site or the removal costs of each trailer once it is no longer needed. Also, the trailers are not designed for long-term storage and are too bulky to efficiently store in large numbers. Moreover, the trailers were of the type that one truck could only pull one trailer, which resulted in the trailers being individually delivered to individuals and families in Mississippi and Louisiana using individual pickup trucks, which resulted in slow deployment of these trailers to those residents in need of temporary housing.
Therefore, it is clear that past solutions have many flaws without even taking into consideration the sheer costs associated with each. As such, there exists a need for housing for similarly displaced individuals and families.